When your page does not know
Somebody asks something you never wrote down. Three honest ways to handle it, and not one of them is a guess in your name.
The impressive part of a page answering questions is not the answering. Any model can produce a paragraph about hiring. The part that decides whether the thing is worth having is what it does the other forty per cent of the time, when somebody asks about something you never wrote down.
Get that wrong and you have built a machine that invents opinions and signs your name to them.
The knob I did not build
Early on the obvious feature request turned up, from me, to me: a slider. Nought means never infer anything, ten means reason freely from what is there. Let each person tune how adventurous their page is.
I am glad I sat on it for a day. Two problems, both fatal.
The first is that nobody can predict a number like that. What does six do? You would find out by being surprised by an answer, which is exactly the situation the setting was supposed to prevent.
The second is worse. Looser inference is not a bolder version of your view. It is a statement in your name that you never made. There is no dial position where a sentence you did not write becomes something you said. The knob was a way of making that feel like a preference rather than a mistake.
Three ways to say you do not know
What replaced it is three words, and you pick one.
Say so
The page says it has nothing on that, and cites nothing. Cleanest, quietest, and right for anyone who wants their page to be strictly a record of what they wrote.
Nearby
The default. The page says it has nothing on that, then points at the closest things it does have, each one quoted and labelled as nearby rather than as your answer. Somebody asking about firing gets told there is nothing on firing, and gets shown the two lessons you wrote about performance conversations, clearly marked as not the thing they asked.
Reason
The page says it has nothing on that, then reasons out loud from what you did write, with every sentence phrased as reasoning and pointing at what it rests on. It is marked as reasoning, end to end, and it never becomes your position.
The important thing all three share: the deciding about who may see what has already happened, before any of this. The mode does not change what the page is allowed to look at. It only changes how it talks about the gap. Nothing in the reasoning mode reaches for something you kept back, because that thing was never in the room.
The gap is the good part
Here is the bit I did not expect when I started.
A question your page could not answer is the most useful thing that happens to it all week. It is somebody telling you, unprompted, exactly which thing you know and have never written down. Nobody has to run a survey to find out what people want to hear from you. They are asking.
So those questions come back to you. They queue up on your own page, in the stranger's words, and answering one is a card: the question at the top, a box, and what happens to your answer shown before you keep it. Answer it and it is yours from then on, and the person who asked gets told their question was answered, once, with a link to ask it again.
That is the loop this whole thing runs on. You cannot write down everything you know in an afternoon, and if you tried you would write down the wrong things. Other people's curiosity is a much better list than the one you would make.
When the reasoning mode has a go at a gap, the same thing happens with one extra step: the reasoning comes back to you as a claim, roughly, is this right? If you say yes in your own words, those words become yours. The reasoning itself never does. It was a guess about you, made in front of somebody, and clearly labelled as one. It does not get to graduate into a fact because it sounded good.
What this looks like on a new page
For the first week, your page will not know a lot. That is fine and it is worth saying out loud, because the instinct is to feel caught out and go and write forty things at once.
Do not. Forty things written to fill a page are forty things written to fill a page, and they read like it. Write the five or six you would say to a junior colleague without preparing, then let the questions tell you what to write next. Two weeks of that beats a weekend of it, every time.
Start a page, or see what people are asking before you do.